Where's the love, man? Daily Beast article suggests Dave Ramsey follows only half of Romans 13:8.

His critics, many of whom are the ex-employees who have been "raptured" out of the company, mock him as Dave Ramses or Dave Ramses II and suggest he's big on the "owing no man anything" part while pretty short on the "loving one another" part of Romans 13:8, saying he subjects his employees and ex-employees to a culture of fear, intimidation and spying. Here in The Daily Beast:

“As a boss, Dave Ramsey was a bully,” said one former employee, who was a member of a secret Facebook group of about 100 former Lampo employees that Ramsey managed to infiltrate without their knowledge last year. “Most of us left Lampo years ago and yet he still haunts us, lurking over our shoulders like he’s the damn Godfather. And many of us are scared of him, unsure of how far he’d go to silence us.”

NT Wright settles for remnant theology to resolve the conflict between kingdom and cross

Here, imagining that God's kingdom is really present in a new form because of the cross even though the concept of final judgment and a transformed world, so prominent in the mouth of the Jesus of the Gospels whom he seeks to recover, rescue and defend, makes narry an appearance. You will find neither the term "judgment" nor the concept once in the essay.

"Kingdom and cross are woven tightly together in some of the very texts which the gospel writers themselves highlight in their interpretation of the story of Jesus. There are of course many, many more, all of which point to the following conclusion. When we see the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel, we should not be surprised to discover that the suffering of Israel, and of Israel's supreme representative, is to be understood in terms of the longer and larger purposes of Israel's God - in other words, the establishment of his worldwide healing sovereignty. Conversely, we should not be surprised to discover that when this God finally claims the nations as his own possession, rescuing them from their evil ways, the means by which he does it is through the suffering of his people - or, as in the story the gospels themselves are telling, the suffering of his people's official, divinely appointed representative."

If that's the best he's got, the greatest living New Testament scholar is nothing but a tired trimmer for whom passages such as "many are called but few are chosen" must be roughly resolved into the single personality of the Messiah who suffers the judgment in the stead of everyone else, an allegorical interpretation designed to escape the difficulty of the plain meaning of the many warning sayings and calls to repentance of the Gospels, not a serious attempt at interpretation. I heard it in preparation for Lutheran seminary already in the early 1970s. 

NT Wright remains NT Wrong, a creature of orthodoxy first and foremost.

How the followers of Mao and the followers of Jesus are similar

John Gray reviewing some academics' essays about Mao's Little Red Book, here:

For Wang, the book “represented a scriptural authority and emanated a sacred aura”. During the Cultural Revolution study sessions were an unavoidable part of everyday life for people in China. Involving “ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts and nightly diary-writing aimed at self-criticism”, these sessions, he writes, “may be seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious hermeneutics and catechism” – a “quasi-religious practice of canonical texts”.

-------------------------------------------------

The instinct to take a text as authoritative and sacred, put it at the center of living, and then to study it, confess one's falling short of it, and even journaling about it, a popular evangelical habit in America by the way, all of it in a decidedly secular, atheistic, and political historical context evinces something telling about human nature, not about the divine. Human beings have a proclivity for ideology and fanaticism which can be exploited through the cult of personality. You may think Maoism is over in comparison to Christianity, but Gray recognizes that it has a Nachleben, and it is no coincidence that that afterlife is mostly in the West.

"Collegial" as The Devil's Dictionary might define it

When members of a faculty commit to work together to enforce conformity of opinion, and can be trusted to silence contrary voices and advance the mediocrities who agree with them even though they fail to uphold the high standards they otherwise use to weed out their enemies. Especially required of junior colleagues without tenure and graduate students, in the opinion of the department chair. Characteristic of divinity programs and the secular departments which envy them. 

Forget the public and the pontifex maximus: Pastor Timothy Tutt goes against Jesus' belief in the devil

Timothy Tutt tut-tuts here:

I’m just the pastor of local church in a small-ish denomination, so it may be folly to go against the majority of a polled public and a popular pontiff. (The pope has the prestige of an international pulpit, the history of the Roman Catholicism, and a cadre of theologians to support his views.) But it’s time to be clear: the devil does not exist.

Jesus (in Matthew 13:37ff):

He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What if Jesus' view of the law was only aspirational, like his belief in the imminently coming Kingdom?

"Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished."

-- Matthew 5:17f.

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel."

-- Mark 1:15

-----------------------------------------------------------

Then neither is the time fulfilled, the kingdom here, nor everything accomplished. Heaven and earth remain, and therefore so does the law.

Black Baptists in Detroit say advocates of homosexuality in the church are God's enemies and theirs

If these Detroit Baptists were white they'd be public enemy number one right now for the clarity of their moral vision, right along side the Westboro Baptists:

"If you are against God you are against me!"

The story and video are here at The Detroit Free Press.

Donald Sterling plays Hosea, loves a slut and revives Hebrew prophecy, telling the truth about Magic Johnson's sordid past

From a different point of view about the matter, here:

Johnson was brought into the story initially when Sterling told his girlfriend [the slut] to delete photos of herself with him [Johnson] from her Instagram account.

“What has he done?” Sterling said of Johnson (via CNN’s transcript). “Can you tell me? Big Magic Johnson, what has he done? He’s got AIDS. Did he do any business? Did he help anybody in South LA?”

Cooper corrected him on Johnson’s health status and eventually the interview, a textbook example of how not to do damage control, meandered back to Magic.

“What kind of guy goes to every city, has sex with every girl, then he goes and catches HIV,” he said. “Is that someone we want to respect and tell our kids about? I think he should be ashamed of himself. I think he should go into the background. And what does he do for black people? He hasn’t done anything."

“Here’s a man I don’t know if I should say this, he acts so holy. He made love with every girl in every city in America, and he had AIDS, and when he had those AIDS, I went to my synagogue and I prayed for him. I hoped he could live and be well. I didn’t criticize him. I could have. Is he an example for children? You know, because he has money, he’s able to treat himself. ..."

I was obviously mistaken about Pope Francis: Diabolus est Jesuita, communisticus. Ita!

The devil is a Jesuit, and a communist one at that.













h/t Chris

Liberalism remains what's the matter with Kansas: plans to build a really big pile of rocks

Methodist Adam Hamilton can't stand the apocalyptic Jesus

Methodist Adam Hamilton has to edit out of the Bible the apocalyptic Jesus, and much else, here:

The violence attributed to God in the Bible is a serious issue that Christians must address. It is inconsistent with the character of God described in many places in the Old Testament, and certainly inconsistent with the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ who calls his followers to love their enemies.

John the Baptist begged to differ:

I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

-- Matthew 3:11f.